Samson Young has won the HK $500,000 (£52,555) Sigg Prize. This is the first time the award has been presented by Hong Kong’s M+ museum.
The win is based on Young’s work over the past two years, with the jury singling out his 2018 installation Muted Situations #22: Muted Tchaikovsky’s 5th. In it, with a nod to John Cage, the Hong Kong artist, who represented the territory at the 2017 Venice Biennale, removed the melody of an orchestral performance, bringing the environmental sounds to the fore.
Young is one of the artists interviewed by Ross Simonini in Subject, Object, Verb, ArtReview‘s new podcast.
The five other shortlisted artists – Hu Xiaoyuan, Liang Shuo, Lin Yilin, Shen Xin and Tao Hui – each receive HK $100,000 (£10,500) each.
The biennial prize takes its name from Uli Sigg, vice chairman of Ringier publishing, one of M+’s major patrons (having donated more than 1,500 artworks), and perhaps the most prominent international collector of contemporary Chinese art. The gong is a de facto successor to the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA), which was founded by Sigg in 1997. Picking the winner were Sigg, together with Tate director Maria Balshaw; Bernard Blistène, director of the Centre Pompidou in Paris; Gong Yan, director of Shanghai’s Power Station of Art; Suhanya Raffel, director of M+; Lai Hsiangling, a Taipei-based curator;and Beijing-based artist Xu Bing.
The much-delayed M+ museum is due to open next year, however work by the shortlisted artists is to be shown at the M+ Pavilion.
Curator Yang Zi was announced the recipient of the inaugural HK $200,000 Sigg Fellowship for Chinese Art Research, adapted from the CCAA Art Critic Prize, founded by Sigg in 2007. The money will fund his research project for his research proposal ‘Diffused Religion and the Origins of the 1980s Avant-Garde of China’.
